Join Us

I'm a huge fan of the abundance in new-comers who are challenging the Creative Cloud. I've been using Sketch for years as my weapon of choice for UI, I recently began playing around with Affinity to replace Illustrator for icons and illustrations.

But I was wondering, is anyone taking a stab at replacing After Effects or do I really still need to keep that CC subscription to have a proper motion graphic tool?

Login to Comment

You'll need to log in before you can leave a comment. Remember: Be nice or else.

Register Today

26 comments

I suppose this all depends on your primary use of After Effects! If you're doing some heavy animation, stick with AE.. but if you're doing this for interactions, transitions of screens etc etc, then you could try Flinto/Principle (as suggested).

Alternatively.. you could use Keynote. Some may laugh, but I find it so quick to mock up an animation I'd like a developer to implement. Granted I use this a lot less than I used to now that Principle is around.

I wonder if people that work at Adobe are noticing these complaints. It seems like almost every week, there is an "Alternative to ". I'm sure it's negligible from their perspective, but it seems like there are lots of opportunities for new companies to grow.

We are of the few - there are massive companies still subscribing to CC with little complaint... I guess because they've not been shown alternatives, or that they trust the big names to do the right job. I'm so excited to see what happens in the software industry over the next 2-5 years. Change is definitely a'coming.

That's true! I found that Flinto's ability to automatically interpolate between connected layers (especially basic shapes) in the Transition Designer, along with 3D rotations and super easy timing/easing tools allowed me to create more stunning animations in 2 day than a motion graphics animator could get through in a week. Sure, it doesn't support multiple keyframes, but you can fake that and get surprisingly far with groups and additional screens.

I use AE intermittently and I've always been incredibly frustrated by it's interface. I swear it was designed to be deliberately obtuse and to give power users a sense of accomplishment from deciphering it.

Hype is great for UI animations and can output HTML. Adobe Animate which is Flash with HTML5 and WebGL support for interactive work. Even if you don't need that, Animate is better at manipulating vectors that AE.

I picked up Apple Motion to test and compare to After Effects, and for UI animations and other simple layer-based animations it's both powerful and relatively easy to use. The downside, compared to After Effects, I discovered, is Motion doesn't have quite as robust of export as AE + Media Encoder. I found a way to convert output videos easily enough with HandBrake (a nice open-source app). The other (bigger) downside is using, say, Affinity Designer + Motion doesn't give you the native vector import to work with that Illustrator + AE does, so you're kind of stuck there if you want to do complex vector/character animation. Motion's vector import support is rather sad. I'd love to see Serif create a cross-platform Affinity companion app for motion, but that's likely far down the road.

I've been wondering this a lot lately, the more I've been using AE. I would love to see the Sketch of After Effects. Naturally, as a product designer, I've had a lot of thoughts around how it could and should work.

But building something like that, while maintaining speed, is - I assume - a huge barrier to entry.

I think it's the wrong approach to try and build AE but with nicer and more intuitive UI. Instead I'd love to see someone figuring out how a new and much much simpler (and cheaper) tool could cater to a sub-set of the AE users.

Who that sub-set of users are and what the exact use is, I'm not sure. Perhaps simple animations for web, or simple motion graphics. Thus leaving the hardcore animators who do heavy 3D work with AE.

This is exactly what Sketch did - they realized there was a ton of UI designers who used PS in a totally hacked and non-intuitive way. So they branched out and created a tool specifically for them. But PS is still a fantastic piece of software for hardcore illustration/drawing/photo-editing.

After Effects is a powerful tool and rock solid, except the recent versions which is kinda buggy in terms of cache playing. After Effects is way more than just animation. You can compose really heavy cinematic effects, 3D tracking, keying and so on. But i am with you there should be a cool alternative tool for motion design only, vector animation, puppet tool, easy export to svg animation, css animation. Not only the creation and manipulation of video files. There is at the moment nothing out there that i am aware of. I have searched heavily for an alternative but i am positive that we will see something like that in the near future.

But you may have a look on principle or flinto for mac for the creation of animated UI Designs for web or mobile.